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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
V. S. Naipaul
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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Running
Thing
World
Melancholy
People
Benefit
Benefits
Stupid
Full
Common
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
V. S. Naipaul
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
V. S. Naipaul
My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
V. S. Naipaul
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
A cat only has itself.
V. S. Naipaul
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
V. S. Naipaul
It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.
V. S. Naipaul
If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
V. S. Naipaul
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
V. S. Naipaul
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul
I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V. S. Naipaul
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V. S. Naipaul
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. Naipaul
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
V. S. Naipaul
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
V. S. Naipaul
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V. S. Naipaul
I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
V. S. Naipaul
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V. S. Naipaul
